TechInitiative

The Importance of Quality Code

April 10, 2007

Being a programmer for 9 years has exposed me to a tremendous amount of code. From a variety of methodologies & programming languages, to more than a handful of "spaghetti-coded" applications, I have seen my fair share of code.

In the beginning of my career, it was an excellent idea to capitalize my ColdFusion tag names, and mix logic and User Interfacing at will. I was also a fan of inline SQL. While these were easily rookie mistakes, they were due to my ignorance as a new programmer.

Before I get to the point of this rant, I would like to say this article is nothing more than a rant, but I do think there are valid points to be made.

Let's say that you have a developer who can develop a .NET, ColdFusion, or ASP application, and get it to work exactly as the client has requested. While this sounds great, it actually means "jack squat" if bad programming practices are put in place.

What about optimizing every aspect of this application to ensure maintainability and scalability for the client and future developers? What about knowing all of the little tricks to make your code Search Engine Friendly? Let's also not forget how important database interactions are since they can cripple a website's speed. The list can easily grow...

What I am really getting at is, there are a sleugh of things to consider when developing a website, and every little "detail" counts. You must absolutely develop code that is maintainable, scalable, efficient, and adheres to a strict programming methodology. Details are not just simple forgettable entities. They are the 2x4's of your house. While missing one may not seem like a big deal, if you were missing all of them, your structure would fall in a hurry.

I have learned that the development of an application really consists of 60% planning and architecting, while the remaining 40% is actual implementation. This means that more than half of your application's development cycle is spent on nothing more than planning and architecting, and this is truly the nuts and bolts of any application.

- Brent Helms
Microsoft Certified Professional